“... of Romanticism, the neglect of Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s ...”

“... Tate Britain until 21 August), there are many examples of that freshness: two of the most famous, Thomas Girtin’s The White House at Chelsea and Turner’s Blue Rigi, hang side by side. There is also Bonington’s view of the Piazza dell’Erbe in Verona, which gives a sense of moving crowds and shifting light that makes Canaletto’s Venetian crowds and ...”

“... This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should not exaggerate the amount of patronage available to evangelical scholars under Henry: Henry, after all, did not like their views, and only patronised them when their views on something else appeared to be more important to him. In her ...”

“... a political orator and thinker was yet to take off. Other heavyweights joined a few years later: Edward Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to Garrick ...”

“... in the voice of ‘one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to the Young Chevalier’ (Charles Edward Stuart), Jacobitism is at most an imaginative stance from which to critique corruption, not a way of calling for regime change. Haywood even puts into the mouth of Bonnie Prince Charlie an incongruously Whiggish recognition that Hanoverian rule was the ...”

“... fall,’ they thought. It was in many ways a book for its time. Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was ...”

“... Hollinghurst’s fondness for triads of the adjective-adjective-noun kind, on the model of Thomas Gray’s ‘mute inglorious Milton’. Nothing is more lyrically English than this smooth cluster, and Hollinghurst’s ability to spool these triplets throughout the book is marvellous. But they appear so often that they begin to act ...”

“... Stafford’s Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997), which brackets Emma with her successor, wife of Edward ‘the Confessor’. Stafford’s earlier Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983) took a broader view, as does Lisa Hilton’s Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (2008). If one were to pick out another powerful ruler too often forgotten, one might ...”

“... gang, headed by a rascally rector, who murdered a Leicestershire magnate and robbed one of Edward I’s trailbaston judges, before going on to commit numerous robberies in Lincolnshire. The gang were brothers, well-connected enough to buy pardons from the Crown, or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The ...”

“... of this history and what they do with it can’t always be predicted, as last year’s toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol showed. But, by any measure, the degree of attention recently given to topics once seen as peripheral to British history is impressive. According to the Royal Historical Society’s Bibliography of British and Irish ...”

“... In​ their groundbreaking biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury ...”

“... it was surely unthinkable that the master of Trinity could have pulled the trigger. Or was it? Thomas Gooch, the Tory master of Caius, had in his capacity as vice-chancellor tried to strip Bentley of his degrees. Among all this brouhaha Bentley managed to establish a reputation as the most learned classical scholar in England. Early in his career, after a ...”

“... and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that ...”

“... among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing himself from the funeral, ‘very little regretted even by his nearest ...”

“... four parallel texts on the page (edited from the lucubrations of the great and good Sir Thomas Urquhart, a fellow Scottish patriot and eccentric genius), prints the vowels and consonants of a passage on separate pages, and interrupts the text with blank sections (where the manuscript was supposedly nibbled by mice). Not all of Gray’s literary ...”